Trump’s Complaint About Israeli Strike on Gas Field Exposes Divergent Strategies

 

Trump’s Complaint About Israeli Strike on Gas Field Exposes Divergent Strategies

 

President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel he disapproved of the attack, which sent energy markets reeling. But Israeli officials said the Americans were informed beforehand.

 

David E. Sanger

By David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents in more than four decades at the Times. He writes often about the revival of superpower conflict, the subject of his latest book.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/trump-netanyahu-iran-gas-field-attack.html

March 19, 2026

 

President Trump said on Thursday that he had complained to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel about the bombing of one of Iran’s largest offshore gas fields, exposing the two allies’ sharply different strategies as they try to disarm Iran, and in the case of Israel, trigger “state collapse.”

 

Asked about the Israeli strike, which sent oil markets reeling, Mr. Trump said, “I told him don’t do that,” and he suggested that Mr. Netanyahu “won’t do that” again in the future.

 

“We’re independent, we get along great,” said Mr. Trump, who spoke to reporters as he welcomed Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in the Oval Office. He insisted that the U.S. and Israeli approaches were “coordinated.”

 

Three Israeli officials briefed on the strike on the gas field said that the United States was informed before the attack. But Mr. Trump, in a Truth Social posting, suggested he knew nothing about it, and said the United States did not participate.

 

In a war that is about to complete its third week with no end in sight, the attack and the furious counterstrikes on the energy facilities of Persian Gulf states revealed that the two allies were clearly not coordinated in their approach.

 

European officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the military operations over the past few days were more evidence of Israel’s belief that if it can dismantle Iran’s main sources of revenue and decapitate its political, military and intelligence leadership, the country will devolve into what the Israelis call “state collapse.”

 

The European view is that the result will be the opposite: Iran’s forces will escalate, using its surviving drones and missiles to destroy the vulnerable infrastructure of its neighbors, in what will become an existential battle.

 

Israel has been targeting the Iranian leadership, and with the attack on the South Pars gas field — a vast natural gas field in the Gulf run jointly by Iran and Qatar — it was striking directly at Iran’s ability to generate revenue. The Iranians responded with a missile attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, significantly damaging one of the Gulf state’s most critical energy hubs.

 

Mr. Trump clearly worries that such attacks and counterattacks will result in even greater surges in the price of oil and gas, and make shippers even more fearful of transiting the Strait of Hormuz. So he has been trying to preserve Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure and keep the country from retaliating at energy facilities throughout the Gulf. With every piece of evidence that the war is escalating, the price of oil increases, and Mr. Trump’s aides are scrambling to contain the economic ripple effects, starting with oil prices.

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that to calm the markets, the United States was thinking about releasing more from the Strategic Oil Reserve, which the administration had failed to refill to capacity in the run-up to the war. But more strikingly, he has discussed suspending sanctions on Iranian oil already at sea — in an effort to free up roughly 140 million barrels — as another way to tamp down prices.

 

That would, of course, bring more revenue to Iran, but Mr. Bessent insisted that “we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 or 14 days, as we continue this campaign.”

 

At every moment, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bessent are trying to signal to the markets that they have everything under control, even amid evidence that their effort to contain Iran’s retaliation — and the markets’ response — is failing. Mr. Trump tried to characterize his conversations with Mr. Netanyahu as a modest difference of opinion. “On occasion, he’ll do something,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday, “and if I don’t like it, and so we’re not doing that anymore.”

 

In their public explanations of the status of the war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contended anew on Thursday that the United States was hitting all of its targets. Mr. Hegseth stressed the attacks on Iran’s defense industrial sites, so that it cannot replace missiles, launchers and drones destroyed in what has been an aerial hide-and-seek operation.

 

They spoke about dropping 5,000-pound bombs earlier this week at a suspected missile storage site near the Strait of Hormuz, part of an effort to keep Iran from being able to harass shipping through the 21-mile-wide stretch that has become a bottleneck for oil and gas exports. The weapon it used was the new GBU-72/B, a bunker-busting bomb that appeared to be directed at cruise-missile storage sites along the strait.

 

“To date we’ve struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure,” Mr. Hegseth insisted, saying that Thursday would be “the largest strike package yet,” repeating his vow of “death and destruction from above.”

 

But the speed of the Iranian retaliation for the South Pars attack was evidence that the United States had not gained what military strategists call “escalation dominance,” the ability to keep an adversary from further escalating its response. And Mr. Hegseth repeated that he would provide no “definitive time frame” for declaring that it had achieved its objectives.

 

In Mr. Hegseth’s telling, the entire war is playing out according to plan. But evidence to the contrary abounds. The rush to find allies to patrol the strait — which so far has resulted in no takers — and the scramble to contain increases in energy prices suggests that the administration continues to be surprised at Iran’s ability to strike back. Its skillful asymmetric attacks are designed to drive prices up and stock markets down in the United States — metrics that get Mr. Trump’s attention.

 

Washington’s fear now is that the Gulf countries, which have shown considerable restraint in not responding to Iranian missile and drone attacks, will begin retaliating. On Wednesday, shortly after the Israeli attack on South Pars, part of the world’s largest offshore gas fields, two waves of incoming ballistic missiles were intercepted over Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, according to the Saudi Defense Ministry.

 

The kingdom’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, warned that his government reserved the right “to take military actions if deemed necessary.”

 

“We will not shy away from protecting our country and our economic resources,” he said at a news conference early Thursday.

 

He would not say how long Saudi patience with attacks would stay in place. “Do they have a day, two, a week?” the prince asked. “I’m not going to telegraph that.”

 

He added that “what little trust” there was between the kingdom and Iran had “completely been shattered.” The countries re-established diplomatic relations in 2023.

 

Vivian Nereim contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

 

David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.